With all that’s going on every day at the hands of the Trump Administration, it feels silly and out-of-touch for me to blog about something like regional dialects; however, I don’t want my blog to turn into just a political sounding board.
My blog has been a blessing to me. It has helped me hone my writing skills. It has given my life some routine and structure after I finally settled on blogging every Monday.
It has increasingly given me a platform through which to express my love of country and the degree to which I value democracy. Most of all, it has introduced me to a network of bloggers around the world. My interactions with them have enriched my life more than I can say.
Deep down inside, I still have an interest in things like words, so I will continue to try to set aside my Monday blog posts for something beside the dismantling of the American democracy or at least give an historical context to that current destruction when I blog about an event from our past.
Today, I am reaching back to one of the reasons I started blogging on June 24, 2010. I wanted to blog about my reading and my writing. Gradually, my love of studying history entered the picture.
Today, I will not blog about my concerns for American democracy except for eluding to it in my introductory paragraphs.
I’m curious about how we all speak English in the United States, but we have beautiful regional dialects. This is something that has always intrigued me.
Today I will blog about our Southern accent and dialect and the Southern Appalachian dialect. There is some overlapping of the two, although the Southern Appalachian dialect is often singled out as something unique.
What prompted me to write about this today?
The short answer is the Rebuilding Hollers Foundation.
In my April 7, 2025, blog post, Books I Read in March 2025, & Hurricane Helene Update, I mentioned the Hurricane Helene recovery efforts of Rebuilding Hollers Foundation, based in Bakersville, North Carolina. Their website is https://rebuildinghollers.org/page-18086.
Not wanting to create confusion, I gave a brief explanation of what a “holler” is, as in “hills and hollers.” As a follow up, today I’m blogging about the Southern Appalachian dialect.
You might be tempted to laugh about “hills and hollers,” and that is fine, but this is not a humorous post. I find dialects fascinating!
I lived and worked in Robeson County in the eastern part of North Carolina some 40 years ago when one-third of the county’s population of 100,000 was white, one-third was black, and one-third was Lumbee and Tuscarora Indian. There were interesting words and sayings in common use there that were new to me, even though I’ve lived in the state my entire life.
One example that comes to mind is “bees” as in “She bees comin’ later. And there is a flatness in the Lumbee speech that is the same as I’ve heard from Cherokee Indians. I can hear it on TV, for example, and immediately know the speaker is either from Robeson County or the Qualla Boundary (home of the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians.) The flatness in their voices is counteracted by colorful and interesting sayings and pronunciations.
Pursuing more information about the Southern Appalachian dialect, I found several helpful articles online in the JSTOR Daily website.
“The Legendary Language of the Appalachian ‘Holler’,” by Chi Luu on the JSTOR Daily website goes so far as to state the following: “In fact, some say that the speech of the southern mountaineers is “pure Elizabethan English” just as Shakespeare would have spoken it. Others go even further and claim that ‘the dialect of the Appalachian people is the oldest living English dialect, older than the speech of Shakespeare, closer to the speech of Chaucer,’ apparently preserved by a brutally impoverished rural existence in the isolation of their mountain fastness, with little contact from the modern civilizing ways of outsiders.”
That article was published in 2018, and I find it a bit harsh in its description of the people who live in the southern Appalachians. It makes them sound like that have never had any contact with the outside world.
I’m no linguistics expert, but as a native North Carolinian I tend to think it was that for a couple hundred years few people from the outside moved into those mountains. That made it easy for the local dialect to continue.
The same holds true for parts of coastal North Carolina. The high tider, hoi toider, or hoi toide English dialect is distinct and lovely to hear. My cousin married a man from Morehead City. He often said “hoi toide” for high tide, and I have never been able to say it like he did. But now I have digressed and gone 400 miles east of the southern Appalachians.
Back to the subject at hand and the JSTOR Daily article I cited in the beginning…
I must disagree a bit more with the writer of that article because I have lived in the southern piedmont of North Carolina most of my life and I don’t consider many of the examples in the article to be strictly from southern Appalachia.
Examples in the article include:
Britches (trousers)
Poke (bag)
Sallet (salad)
Afeared (afraid
Fixin’ (getting ready to do something, “I’m fixin to go to town.”)
Allow (suppose, as in “I’ll allow that you’re right.”
Yander (yonder)
Leetle (little)
Spell (as in “I’ll stay for a little spell”
My parents said “britches” and my father’s oldest brother (born in 1899) always called a paper bad a “paper poke.” I don’t hear it as much as I did growing up, but it was not uncommon to hear someone in the southern piedmont to say that they were “fixin” to do something.
And that brings us back to “holler”
Holler (hollow)
Winder (window)
Tater (potato)
Feller (fellow)
Again, I thought those were just southern pronunciations. I’ve probably heard window pronounced “winder,” but the common pronunciation where I live is “winda.” I don’t think I’ve ever heard a hollow pronounced “hollow” except in references to The Legend of Sleepy Hollow. Along those same lines, I’m reminded that my mother had and Aunt Ella, but in my great-grandfather’s daybooks he wrote his daughter’s name “Eller.”
And around here we would never say, “fellow.” We would say “fella.” Same situation as “winda” instead of window.
One of my uncles married a woman from the NC southern Appalachians. She pronounced fellow as feller. I always noticed that because in the southern piedmont we would say “fella.” Remembering the time she said, “A feller’s gotta do what a feller’s gotta do,” still makes me smile. Don’t be surprised if those words show up in a piece of my fiction writing someday. Aunt Mary’s mountain dialect was definitely more distinct than my piedmont dialect, and I found it endearing.
Were the roots in Scotland and Ireland?
It is said that many pronunciations and words can be traced back to Scotland and Ireland. I was surprised to learn a few years ago that on the Kintyre Peninsula of Scotland, it is (or at least at some time was) common to call a bag a poke. That’s where my gggg-grandparents (Morrison) immigrated from, so somehow “poke” got carried down to my uncle. No one else in the family called it that.
Other words in Chi Luu’s article include might could or might should (“We might could go to the ballgame.”) I had a classmate in school who said, “might could.” We grew up less than ten miles apart, but I had never hear “might could” before. Perhaps it was something passed down in his family.
Another oddity pointed out in the JSTOR Dailyarticle is what the writer called “a-prefixing.” An example would be a-runnin’.
And then there is the perfectly good word, “reckon,” as in “I reckon it’ll take an hour to get there.” Chi Luu’s articles said “reckon” is in regular use in Australia and British English, but its use in the Southern Appalachians (and the wider region) is “stigmatized as backwards hillbilly talk. American language attitudes show a marked disrespect and prejudice for marked dialects like Appalachian English.”
One more example attributed to southern Appalachia but not uncommon in the southern piedmont is “like to” or “liketa.” One would say, “I got lost and liketa never found my way out.”
You’ve probably noticed that we Southerners tend to drop the “g” at the end of words. It’s not that we’re lazy. That’s just a part of our speech patterns. The “ah” sound is a softer pronunciation than the “ow” sound.
Like I said, dialects fascinate me, so don’t be surprised if I write about them against sometime. With the advent of television, the southern dialect and pronunciations have eroded. I hear it in my great nieces’ voices. They were all born and raised in Metro Atlanta, but my North Carolina southern accent is much more pronounced than theirs. That makes me sad. I don’t want the southern accent or dialect to die out.
Hurricane Helene Update
As of Friday, 105 roads in North Carolina were still closed due to Hurricane Helene. This count includes seven US highways, 13 state highways, and 85 state roads. Although technically “open” now, I-40 in Haywood County is still open for just one lane in both directions with a 35 mile-per-hour speed limit.
There are still no estimates of when all of the Blue Ridge Parkway in North Carolina will reopen.
Until my next blog post
I hope you always have a good book to read.
Remember the people of Ukraine as they continue to beat back a much larger invader; Kentucky because the misery left behind from recent flooding there has completely fallen off the mainline media’s radar; the earthquake victims in Myanmar because they must be shocked that the US isn’t sending aid or aid workers to alleviate their suffering; and western North Carolina (because seven months after Hurricane Helene, the need is still great.)
Janet
Janet's Writing Blog 